“Dear Steven,

Thanks for your email, but at this point I have NOT actually received your message because I have implemented a challenge-response anti-spam system.

Before I can receive your message you must respond as outlined below.

Once you have done this once I will receive your ORIGINAL and all FUTURE messages.

Just reply to this email message – just make sure that the subject of your reply contains the subject of this message.

If you do not respond within 7 days, your message will be DELETED and I will not be able to receive messages from you in the future.

I apologize for this one-time inconvenience, but I have been forced to implement this challenge-response anti-spam solution due to the amount of spam I am receiving.

Thank you,

Sales”

If you’re having problems with spam, use Gmail (on its own, or as part of the suite of Google Apps). It’s got a lot of tools to keep spam out of your inbox. This is a much better (i.e. customer-friendly) solution to requiring potential customers to re-send messages.

From where I’m sitting there are two options:

1. Receive no spam, but stop receiving emails from some potential clients/customers/visitors.
2. Receive spam, but receive emails from all potential clients/customer/visitors.

Seems like an easy choice to me. Thankfully, this is the first time I’ve come across this ‘anti-spam’ procedure. But if your church or ministry uses this (or something similar), please turn it off!

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Help is here!

I just noticed this in my Gmail account:

This new feature enables you to set a reminder to follow up with your recipient if you haven’t heard back from them (via email) within your designated time-frame.

Useful tool.

I’m not sure if it has been enabled on all Gmail accounts, or if it’s just being tested on a few. Can you see it?

Update

Some people have written in and not know where they should be looking to see this new service. Here are a couple of screenshots to show you what I’m seeing:

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1. Alienation. Someone shared that they had been excluded from social events because they didn’t have a Facebook account. That’s not very nice. If lack of access to technology excludes people from community, this should raise warning bells. At the very least, there should be more than one way for people to access information – limiting communication about an event to one channel (e.g. Facebook) is exclusive as it assumes that people a) have access to technology (e.g. Facebook), and b) want to use it. We should assume neither.
2. Addiction. This example of a South Korean couple starving their child to death while caring for a virtual child is at the extreme end of the spectrum. But the need to be plugged-in, to know what’s happening, to read updates, to share updates is a modern and unhelpful phenomenon that has the Center for Internet Addiction. If only we felt the same eagerness to read God’s word and pursue our relationship with Him. On a more light-hearted note, wondering if you’re addicted to Twitter? Try this fun quiz. Apparently I’m 45% addicted to Twitter. It’s a fine line between engagement and addiction. Other posts I’d recommend include: ‘Addicted to tweets‘, ‘Excessive internet use linked to depression‘, and ‘Enabled or enslaved by technology?‘.
3. Laziness. Some things are best communicated face-to-face, or at least over the phone. Technology allows us to be lazy and laziness is never good. For example, sending your Bible study leader a text message to let them know that you won’t be coming tonight. That’s lazy – if you are not going to be there, it’s courteous to pick up the phone and apologise and explain. It’s easier to send a text, but for the benefit of your leader who has spent hours preparing and who is responsible for caring for you, it’s not a good option.
4. Potential to sin. I’m not sure if our opportunities to sin have increased with technology, or if we’re simply more aware of them. But take for example Facebook – it can prompt jealousy and envy (I wish I had what she has), pride (posting status updates to promote ourselves), lust (looking at unhelpful photos of people), gossip (sharing news on Facebook, or that we heard on Facebook) about others. The list goes on. Sure, Facebook didn’t invent jealousy, envy, pride, lust and gossip – but it sure makes these sins easy to fall into!
5. Wasting time. Nielsen recently revealed the extent of time spent on Facebook, and how this is increasing. On this site I shared how Australians spend 29% of all time online, on Facebook. I know I seem to be picking on Facebook – I’m not, it just provides lots of good examples! Technology can make us more efficient and productive, but it can also just help us to waste time. And we waste a lot. When the Master returns, I want to be busy doing his business, not procrastinating on Facebook.

What would you add to this list?

(Feature image attribution – it’s a light-hearted image for a more serious topic! http://www.flickr.com/photos/paloetic/ / CC BY-NC 2.0)

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“I recently came to the realization that email owns me. A good technology that should be at my disposal has instead taken over and put me at its disposal. And if you’ve read Postman you’ll know that technology is very good at this. No sooner do we put a technology in our service than we find that it has so changed our lives that suddenly we have become enslaved to it.”

How many of us can relate to this feeling?

You can read the full post here, with Tim’s resolutions for dealing with this realisation.

Are you owned by your email?

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I’ve been trawling through my emails (as you do when you return from holidays), and came across an interesting email from Magnation. I subscribe to their emails for news on interesting magazine releases. Their e-newsletter this time around was promoting Valentine’s Day purchases, with some not-too-subtle references to sex – basically suggesting that buying a magazine for a loved one will lead to more sex. This approach isn’t particularly unexpected in modern marketing. What was unexpected was the footer at the bottom of the email which read:

“Complaints about our resorting to sexual references to sell a product can be directed to info@magnation.com.

Please put in the subject box “I am a prude and I deserve a spanking” and we will do our best to respond to you in an appropriate and sensitive manner. And if you want to unsubscribe you can do so here. We promise to not publicly ridicule you or publish your name in the obituaries columns, although you will of course, be dead to us.”

Was the insensitive work experience student steering the ship in the marketing department the day this email was sent out?!

I’m not sure how ridiculing your customers can ever be seen as a good approach to increasing sales or promoting good will. Sure, it might make you look edgy and cool to a particular demographic within your subscriber base, but it’s at the expense of alienating another (perhaps larger) bunch of customers. Is that worth it?

I wasn’t particularly offended by the email, but I was by the footer – though its font size was small, its impact was significant.

What’s the message for us as Christian communicators with many of our churches using email newsletters? Every part of the message, from head to toe, is important. Read and re-read what you’ve written. And if you’re going to offend, make sure it’s worth it.

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• What are the service times for your church?
• What are the bank details to give to the church?
• Can you add me to the list to receive the weekly email newsletter?
• I’d like to join the church – how do I do this?
• I want to become a Christian – how do I do this? (wouldn’t it be great if that were a common question!)

If you have ever had the need to write the answer to the same question twice, you might benefit from using Google’s canned responses. Launched in 2008, I only just discovered this handy tool a couple of week’s ago when a friend put me onto it.

Canned responses allows you to save a response to easily re-use it on another occasion. They save you from re-typing the email from scratch. They save you from having to dig around to find the response you gave to the same question three months ago.

Of course, you can adjust any of the response to customise them as you need, and you can add text before, after or in the middle of the canned response, but  simply having the pre-written response on-hand can be a real time-saver. Other uses of this tool including adding signatures to the bottom of emails, or creating templates for weekly roster reminders, or weekly emails to your Bible study group.

If you use a Mac, but don’t use email, you might like to try out a tool called TextExpander (explained in more detail, along with some other email tips, in ‘8 tips for email liberation‘).

But if you don’t use Gmail, perhaps it’s time you switched – there’s lots of benefits to using this tool to manage your email!

It’s easy to import your email to Google from another web-based email account (e.g. Hotmail), and even if you don’t want to use a Gmail account, you can send and receive your email, using the Gmail interface, by importing your mail settings.

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1. Here are my hands. A cool concept for a video clip for a new Christian song.
2. John 3:16 in Pop Culture. A photo gallery by TIME magazine.
3. 8 ways Twitter can benefit the Christian. h/t Tim Challies.
4. Memorise a verse of Scripture for each letter of the alphabet. Daggy website, great idea.
5. Top 10 regrettable emails. A series by TIME magazine.

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The same is true of ministry, but I feel in this context, email is too quickly selected as the best means of communication. It’s understandable – email communication is just so convenient. It doesn’t take long to write an email – and in fact, it takes the same time to send an email to one person as it does to send to your whole congregation. There are lots of efficiency gains to be had.

However, I think we need to be more discerning with when we use email to communicate. Not necessarily because of the disadvantages of email (though there are many!), but because of the advantages of personal (face-to-face or voice-to-voice) communication.

I’ve put together some guiding principles for when email should be avoided (based on my own observations and mistakes) – what do you think?

1. Avoid email…when you are asking someone to serve.
Inviting someone to participate in ministry is a special interaction. You are recognising that they have gifts and abilities that make them suitable to serve, and you are inviting them to use these gifts to serve the Body. It’s easy to think of asking someone to serve as simply filling a gap, but by making this a personal conversation (phone or face-to-face) you have the opportunity to encourage them (by noting the gifts you’ve seen that God has given them), and by painting a picture of the vision you have for the ministry, with their involvement.

2. Avoid email…when you need a quick response.
If you need to confirm that Suzie can read the Bible at church on Sunday, if it’s less than four days out, a phone call is the best way to confirm. A phone call enables instant confirmation (rather than waiting for a response, or wondering if they even got the email!), and if they are unable to serve, you’ve still got time to find a replacement.

3. Avoid email…when you want to encourage someone.
Think of the difference if you were to receive an email encouraging you for the good job you did praying at church on Sunday, or if you received a phone call to communicate the same encouragement. The effort taken to make the phone call, plus the personal nature of the conversation, makes email the lesser option.

4. Avoid email…when you are upset.
I’ve sent emails when I’ve been upset, and this was foolish. I’ve said things that I would never have said in person. I’ve reacted to things that would have easily been clarified if I’d picked up the phone or met up in person. It’s easy to fire off an email when upset, but it’s a foolish option.

5. Avoid email…if there’s any chance your email might be misunderstood.
The written word is easily misunderstood – either because the writer may not have written clearly, or because the reader may have read with his or her own bias. Regardless, if there’s a chance that a misunderstanding might occur, the potential time spent in damage control dealing with the mis-communication will soon overtake the time you should have spent making the original phone call.

6. Avoid email…when you are canceling or apologising.
It’s not easy to tell someone that you can no longer come along to an event, or can no longer (or would no longer like to) be involved in a particular ministry. Email is an easy way to communicate this, but I think it’s a cop-out. I think this is a simple issue of courtesy (and the same goes for cancelling via SMS!). Similarly, it’s much easier to apologise over email than in person. To apologise in person displays humility, plus you have the advantage of being able to ask for forgiveness, and for the other person to offer forgiveness, thus restoring the relationship.

7. Avoid email…when you have a suggestion on how to do something better (i.e. constructive criticism!).
When you send an email, you don’t know how the recipient is going. They could be having a terrible day/week/month. Your feedback could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back! Giving feedback in person allows you to see how the other person is going, read the visual cues, and communicate gently where necessary!

8. Avoid email…when you are rebuking.
Similar to the example above, delivering (and receiving) a rebuke isn’t easy at the best of times. In personal interactions, facial expressions and body language count for a lot (this video gives a good explanation of non-verbal cues). When rebuking, responding to these cues is important. Therefore, I would go the further step to suggest that the best way to rebuke is face-to-face, not even over the phone.

9. Avoid email…when the interaction will be back and forth.
Email isn’t the forum to converse – it takes time, it’s prone to misunderstandings and it’s not immediate. If you want to have a conversation with someone, have a conversation.

10. Avoid email…to share private information.
When you are sending an email, like it or not, there is the potential that the contents of the email may be shared with others. This isn’t always a bad thing (e.g. you can forward an email with prayer points), but private information that would be harmful if distributed beyond the recipients of the email should be discussed in person. Therefore it’s safe to assume that the contents of an email may be made public, and communicate in person where necessary.

This is just a start based on my own experience – what would you add or subtract from this list?

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• When you absolutely, positively should NOT use email: a civilised list by ChangeThis.
• Why email starts fights – a helpful video explaining the role of words, tone and visual cues and their respective roles in communication.
• Marketing expert, Seth Godin shares 14 tips for sending emails.
• Seth shares email checklist – for before you click ‘send’.
• How to improve your email etiquette by Marci Alboher
• Email Etiquette 101 by Netmanners.
• Email Etiquette Tips, Tricks and Secrets by About.com.
• Email Etiquette by iwillfollow.com.
• When not to use email by David Pollard.

Communication Decision Tree

Here’s a useful flow-chart I found on Lifehacker for thinking through communications decisions. You wouldn’t use it to guide all decisions, but it’s a helpful way of thinking about how best to communicate different things. You can click on the image to see the flowchart at full-size:

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